A Read on “The Reader”

February 14, 2009

Taylor Clark, writing in Slate, offers a perceptive glance at “The Reader” in the context of his report on a sex scandal involving Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland (an openly gay man), and a former intern who was a boy of seventeen when their relationship began:

Critics see the movie “The Reader,” wherein a 36-year-old Kate Winslet beds a 15-year-old boy, and they speak of a “tender sexual awakening,” as every straight man in the theater (including me) thinks, “I would have sold my siblings into bonded labor to sleep with Kate Winslet when I was 15, you little bastard.” Portray a 36-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl, though, and you’re in … well, “Lolita” territory—no mercy there.

Two years ago, “Notes on a Scandal”—in which Cate Blanchett played a school teacher who has an affair with a teen-age boy—collected four Oscar nominations (no wins), including one for Blanchett (the teacher does come to grief over the illicit liaison).

“Manhattan,” from 1979, in which Woody Allen plays a middle-aged man having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl, was also nominated for two Oscars—Allen and Marshall Brickman, for the script, and Mariel Hemingway, who plays the girl, for Best Supporting Actress. (They didn’t win either.)

P.S. Also in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum challenges “The Reader” as “a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.”